It is one of the evils of evil tyrannies that they seek to implicate everyone in their system, by means of spying, the granting of privileges, etc. But it is not only tyrannies that do this: modern bureaucracies, even in liberal democratic states, do this also. For example, in the British state hospital system (and no modern state does entirely without public hospitals), doctors undergo a compulsory annual appraisal by a colleague, decreed and designed by the administration, without any evidence that it improves performance in any way whatever. Its purpose is not to improve performance; it purpose is to destroy independence.

The very fact of participating in a process that is universally recognised to be a useless is harmful, for everyone who does so is 'only obeying orders' for the sake of his own peace and quiet and for the sake of his career; in other words, by taking part, he has already lost some of his integrity.

Thank you for the ping. I should be quite a bit less hard on Dalrymple in the Albanian cell then he was himself, and for the reason he puts forth later in the article. A stand on principle that forces one's opponent to acknowledge it is a brave and wonderful thing; a stand on principle that keeps one's opponent from backing down from being in the wrong is actually counterproductive both to principle and to outcome. And it isn't always obvious which situation one is in. Sometimes it's both at once.

Even today, the interpretation of the ubiquitous black-marketeers under the Occupation is much disputed: were they ruthless predators concerned only for their own good, were they quietly undermining the occupiers (who were trying to extract as much economic surplus from France as possible, which diversion of goods on to the black market reduced, thereby improving the lot of ordinary Frenchmen), or were they in fact assisting the occupiers by making the whole system viable, which it would not have been without the black market? Or were they all of these things at once?

The latter, I think. The reason there is such moral ambiguity here is that there are two sources of guidance at play: principle in the absence of any knowledge other than the immediate conditions, and a perfect knowledge of outcomes of the alternatives, wherein the principle involved is which outcome is to be preferred. Both of these extremes are exceedingly rare in the real world.

My point is that these are two different principles. Hence our moral choices will always contain in them the seed of uncertainty. Because such principles conflict, as they did for the black marketeers, as they did for Dalrymple. The mind that can know all of this and infallibly choose the correct course is not, I think, the mind of Man.

The very fact of participating in a process that is universally recognised to be a useless is harmful, for everyone who does so is 'only obeying orders' for the sake of his own peace and quiet and for the sake of his career; in other words, by taking part, he has already lost some of his integrity.

A point I have tried to make, though never as eloquently as this, my own self.

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